Regardless of how many great articles that come out about recent changes to music licensing and payments to artists, in the grand scheme of things, most artists are still not happy.

Vinyl Is Great & I Even Like How It Smells!

Based on my very unscientific polling on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the folks who buy and collect music are more likely to spend time listening without multitasking. That makes sense to me — they loved the music enough to buy an LP, CD or download, so their interest was more than casual. They have a deeper connection with music.

Another reason to buy music on LP, CD, or Bandcamp is to support, financially, the bands you love. Many of the collectors who talked to me are adamant in their beliefs that subscription services are cheating artists.

Rock icon Peter Frampton, for example, isn’t exactly cleaning up with streaming services. He tweeted this in August of this year: “For 55 million streams of, ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, I got $1,700. I went to Washington with ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers] last year to talk to law makers about this. Their jaws dropped and they asked me to repeat that for them.” A lot of musicians and composers feel cheated by the subscription companies.

Another collector reinforced that point. “As a musician, it’s a huge difference between what we make from the sale of a CD, or even a download, let alone vinyl, versus a subscription, which is streaming. The difference is an order of magnitude. If you want to support an artist, buy the physical media, or buy an actual download, preferably from their website or Bandcamp.”

In 2018 bands still record music, but its prime function is to promote the band for live shows, which are generally more lucrative. If they’re not famous, they probably have little or no expectation of making much income from recorded music. So they record less and less. The band’s legacy isn’t what it could be.